Written in Dead Wax (27 page)

I pulled her towards me and put my arms around her and squeezed for dear life. She was warm. She was real. She was hugging me back. I was breathing in her perfume. It was all true. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might be having a medical emergency. But a good one.

I pushed her back so I could look at her. I said, “You were wearing a vest. When they shot you. A bulletproof vest.”

She shook her head. “Nothing that complicated. I saw the muzzle flash in the dark. I guess it must have been Heinz. Because Heidi was running away from us. He was firing towards us, towards me. But he had to be careful not to hit her. So when he started shooting I had time to get out of the way before he could range in on me. When I saw the muzzle flash, what I actually tried to do was gracefully duck out of the line of fire, but I’d forgotten that I was running beside that ditch. That fucking ditch. The anti-rat ditch. And I fell into it.”

I was beginning to put it together in my head. “And you climbed out of it before the…”

“Before the torrent of flaming oil flowed into it. Ouch. Yes, luckily I scrambled out before that.”

“You climbed out on the other side of the greenhouse. That’s why I didn’t see you.”

“That’s right.” She nodded towards the house. “What happened to old Atsushi?” I looked through the window and saw that my escort had disappeared. “He was looking quite sick.”

“He forgot to blow the fluff off his boss’s needle,” I said.

“I’m not even going to begin to ask what that might mean.”

This garden was a strange place. Neither indoors nor outdoors, it was a cube in the centre of the house, walled in by glass on all sides but with the roof open to the elements. It was heated just like being inside the house, though. Which is why she could stand there in that dress, not shivering and no gooseflesh on her smooth skin. But beneath the rounded white pebbles underfoot I suspected there was a man-made floor. At the centre, the water feature was a little pile of flat black stones with a trickle of water flowing through them, emanating from an unseen source and vanishing to some unknown destination, also presumably in that floor.

I looked at the cherry tree. That at least was planted in a bed of real earth. But it was surreal to see it in blossom in the middle of winter. Yet the little leaves were vivid and pink. Perhaps wealth could buy you even that.

I said, “And you’ve been here ever since?”

“Pretty much,” said Nevada. “How could I stay away from good old Nakadakemachi? Once you’ve learned to pronounce it, you just can’t stay away.”

“Yes, because you’ve invested so much time and energy in it,” I said.

“Exactly.” A petal fell onto my shoulder and she brushed it off. “Who’s looking after the girls while you’re over here?”

“Maggie promised to look in and feed them while I’m gone.”

“Tinkler’s sister?”

“Yes.”

“And how is old Tinkler?”

A petal fell into her hair. Pink on black. I didn’t touch it. It was perfect. “He’ll be pleased to hear about this,” I said.

She took a step towards me.

I took a step back from her.

“Listen,” she said.

“How could you not tell me?” I said.

“Listen.” She put her hands on my shoulders. I shook them off.

“How could you let me think you were dead?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? Do you know what it felt like? How could you not tell me?”

She shook her head. The petal floated to the ground. “It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?”

“At first, all was confusion. I was chasing the Aryan Twins. I heard the fuel tank collapse and I heard the fire. But I had to be sure that they, and their Aryan guns, were gone. So I followed them as they made their retreat. They were parked in the road outside. In the good old silver SUV. They drove off and by that time I heard sirens in the distance. So I hurried back into the factory yard, or should I say the great cannabis greenhouse conflagration and I saw…”

“You saw that the record had been destroyed.”

“Yes,” she said. “And I saw that you’d driven off.”

“What?”

She said, “You were in a bit of a hurry, weren’t you?”

“Hughie told me you were dead. He said he saw you lying there dead.”

“Lying is right.”

“And then he told me you’d been buried. That your body had been buried.”

“Good old Hughie. The Scottish Welshman. Still, he’s raised a nice daughter so he must be doing something right.” She glanced at me. “How is Boo?”

“Like the rest of us. She’ll be relieved to hear that you’re not dead.”

“Look, I’m sorry.”

“How could you not tell me you were alive?”

“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

“Yes, because I’m here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m only here because I found the record.”

“Yes,” she said. “That was amazing, wasn’t it? I can’t get over you just finding it like that, in your house. I mean, having it all along.” She looked at me through the mist. “It’s just like that dreadful Coelho novel.”

And the surface of my brain rippled with the sensation of déjà vu.

“I thought it was sort of okay,” I said. “That book.”

“Really? Anyway, it was a good job I brought back the fragments of good old
Easy Come, Easy Go
. What was left of it, that is, after the great cannabis conflagration.”

“That was you?”

“Yes, there wasn’t much left of the sleeve, and the record was just this melted blob. But enough survived to authenticate the find. Luckily for me.” She looked at me. “Because Mr Hibiki might otherwise have been tempted to think that you and I were in league.”

“To do what?” I said.

“To fake the record being destroyed and then you pretending to find another copy. And getting all the money for it.”

“But we’re not in league,” I said.

“No we’re not,” she said, gazing at me as if she was searching for something in my face. I suppose she didn’t find it, because then she said, “You’re not looking at this in the most positive light.”

I stared at the cherry tree. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t real, either.

I said, “Let me tell you what I think. I think that once you confirmed that the record was destroyed, you didn’t think there was any point in getting back in touch with me. I’d outlasted my usefulness. Because the project was over. So you just came back here to give Mr Hibiki your report. And that was the end of that. If I hadn’t found the record and ended up flying out here, you would never even have told me you were alive.”

She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. She said, “When I didn’t tell you right away, it just got harder and harder, the longer I waited.”

“If I hadn’t found the record, I’d still think you were dead.” I looked at her. “You would have let me think that.”

I turned my back on her and walked away. Back through the sliding glass and down the corridor. Atsushi was waiting impatiently by the front door. He drove me to catch my flight.

All the way back to London I could smell her perfume.

I jerked awake so abruptly that Fanny jumped off the bed with a little cry of protest. My heart was slamming in my chest.

The noise that had woken me was still ringing in my ears.

I lay there listening for it to come again. I was still disoriented with the jet lag of my flights to and from Japan. All I could hear was the early-morning chatter of birds outside. Fanny paused casually in the middle of the floor to wash herself, just to demonstrate that she hadn’t really been spooked. What was it that had woken me? A sudden, violent sound. Whatever it was, it had scared the hell out of me. I was soaked with sweat.

Fanny had apparently decided to relocate to the chair in the corner of the bedroom, and hopped onto it. She curled up on the cushion, gave me a pointed stare for having disturbed her, and went back to sleep.

Turk sauntered lazily in, hard little paws tapping on the floor. She jumped up on the bed. I was surprised to see her. Despite being the intrepid explorer and implacable mouse-killer, she was amazingly skittish. Any sudden noise should have sent her fleeing for the high timber.

If the sound I’d heard had been real, she would be hiding in a distant corner of the house right now.

Instead she ambled across the bed, insolently treading over me on her way to the windowsill. She paused, then hopped up, neatly ducking under the curtains. Only her tail protruded as she took up her position there, staring out into the big world.

So I must have dreamed it. The sound. My mind had conjured it with hypnagogic vividness. And I knew what it was now. I recognised it.

The gunshot from the record.

I was even dreaming about the damned thing.

Seeing Nevada had driven all the other questions from my mind, but now they were crowding back in on me. There had been a message from the bank waiting for me when I’d got back from Japan yesterday. It confirmed the transfer of funds from Mr Hibiki.

And once again I thought, no record was worth that kind of money. So what was going on? I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Turk stirred on the windowsill. Fanny snuffled in her sleep.

Why was it worth so much to him? And not just to him.

Someone else had also wanted it, badly enough to be willing to kill for it.

But the one thing I couldn’t get out of my mind was the smile Mr Hibiki had been smiling when he slid the album in with the others. He hadn’t smiled like that when he had first got his hands on it, or when he first listened to it.

Only when he had filed it safely away with the other thirteen Hathor albums.

It had been a smile of triumph.

Ever since I’d seen it, I’d been trying to convince myself that this was just a case of an obsessive collector finally completing a set. Filling an annoying gap. Crossing it off his mental list.

But I didn’t believe that. This was about more than a man and his record collection.

Behind the curtain, Turk chattered as she spotted a low-flying bird. I rolled over and tried to find a comfortable spot for my head on the pillow. My mind kept turning the question over and over. I needed to know. What the hell was Hibiki up to? Who were his competitors—the people behind the Aryan Twins? What was going on?

Of course, there was one person who might be able to tell me.

But I was damned if I was going to phone her.

I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. Fanny snored on her chair. Turk stirred from time to time on the windowsill, to get a better vantage point. My mind kept turning over and finally I gave up and got out of bed. I checked the clock.

This morning I had to collect Tinkler.

* * *

Some people come out of hospital addicted to the painkillers. Tinkler came out addicted to grapes. The first thing we had to do when they discharged him was go to the local Marks and Spencer and buy him some to take home. We got Clean Head to drive us into Hammersmith.

She had opened the panel that separated driver from passengers and asked me about Nevada, and I told her she was away in Japan on business. This seemed to satisfy Clean Head and she even made some remark about what a lucky girl. She had completely missed out on the whole period when Nevada had been dead, which was an odd thing to contemplate.

Tinkler’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it. “It’s Maggie. A text message.” He frowned. “It says, ‘Have you seen the papers?’”

“Well, that’s a silly question,” I said. There were probably no two other grown men in London less likely to pick up a newspaper. Tinkler frowned at the phone.

“She’s also sent us some links.” We looked at each other. “Better click on them,” he said.

They were both newspaper sites. The first headline read
DJ FINDS MILLION DOLLAR LP
.

The second one,
CRATE DIGGER STRIKES GOLD
.

The first article featured a photograph of me taken by some nonentity at a record fair years ago, in which I managed to look both pretentious and educationally subnormal. Of course, this rogue picture over which I had no control was the only one that had crept out into cyberspace to announce my presence to the world.

But that wasn’t my worry at the moment. We looked at each other.

“How the hell did they find out?” he said.

“Nevada’s people must have let it leak.”

He was frowning at me. “Why?”

I shrugged, but I was beginning to guess. I said, “What’s the point of beating the opposition if the opposition don’t know it?”

“Ah, I see.” Tinkler nodded.

“Plus it will have the effect of calling off the dogs.” I realised that now I’d got over the shock of this exposure, I was oddly relieved.

“You mean the Aryan Twins.”

“Yes.”

“You mean now they can just pack their bags and slink back off to… Arya? Is that a place?”

“No.”

“So that’s the last you’ll see of them,” said Tinkler. After a moment he added, helpfully, “Assuming they’re not vengeful types.” He put the phone away and settled back in the taxi seat. “Speaking of Nevada…”

“Yes?”

He sighed. “So… she’s alive and we’re all rejoicing that she’s alive.”